Can Germany’s Far Right Be Stopped?

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Ben, you are wise to escape Los Angeles. We don't have to disclose where you are. Ben's overseas at the moment. You can disclose if you want, but it's like, it's literally like a rainforest here right now. It's going to be 100 degrees on Wednesday and the dew point is basically where it is in a rainforest. That is how miserably humid it is in Los Angeles. When I left it was like pouring like it was a tropical climate too. So that was fun. We've had pouring rain and scorching heat, there's no climate change or anything, but that's not normal Los Angeles. I don't remember El Nino sucking this bad. Is it always a huge nightmare? Apparently. Well, this is supposed to be the mega El Nino, right? This is supposed to worsen all the other ones. So buckle up. It's not as fun as. You move out to L.A. New York or never. And I'm like, I've missed New York and I was like, oh, but the weather will be great. Now we can't even say that. Here we are, well, Boohoo, L.A.S. are first world problems. We got some additional problems for the part of the first world we're going to talk through today. Starting with some regional elections in Germany that have rocked Europe, frankly rocked a lot more places than Europe. We're also going to talk about the Trump emissaries, Steve Woodcoff and Jared Kushner. They're tripped to Russia and Ukraine. We'll talk about the scary resurgence of ultra-nationalist fervor and celebration of genocide in Serbia. Some major news updates from Israel, including a policy change by the UK. I'll talk about the latest in the war with Iran and then finally another massive corruption scandal swirling around far-right British MP Nigel Farage. Lots of UK-focused stuff, Ben. Then you just did our interview then. What are we talking about there? So yeah, I talked to Lawrence Wright, who's really one of my favorite writers. And he wrote The Looming Tower, which is kind of the definitive book that was about to lead into 9/11 the failures of the US government and al-Qaeda and its intentions. So we talked about, and he's written a new introduction for that book, by the way. So if people want to check it out, they should. We talk about essentially how to make sense of the failures. There's no way to put it in the last 25 years. How did the US get it so wrong? Some of his concerns that actually given all the destruction of the US government and the direction of intelligence agencies that focus on weird Trump priorities that we actually might be complacent. We might be kind of going through the cycle again where we're letting our guard down. You don't think how good it is. How good it is. Plotting in the Fulton County Georgia Elections Office. That's not what we're saying. Exactly. Or the immigration enforcement division. And then really interesting conversations about how do we learn, how do we see the world and understand it better so that we don't make the kinds of mistakes we made after 9/11? Some of the unanswered questions about the 9/11 attacks, including the potential Saudi involvement that has always been something that bugged Lawrence Wright as well as other people. And just how 9/11 changed his life and changed the country. So it's a good reflective conversation that I think that as we head up to this anniversary, it's worth checking out. Absolutely. Looming Tower is truly one of the best books. Also, I think it's one of the things that you would always quizzes you on if you go on this show, so make sure you read that before you go on that podcast. All right, Ben, let's start with the weekend's elections in Germany, which were historic for all the wrong reasons, all the worst reasons, really. The alternative for Germany party or the AFD won 43.8% of Sunday's vote in the Saxony on-holt regional elections. So the AFD now holds 39 of that state's 83 regional assembly seats, which is not a full majority, but it's damn close. In the past, other German political parties have refused to go into coalition with the AFD to keep them out of government, not prevent them from governing. That's a so-called firewall policy. That may happen again here, but the AFD is going to try to convince three members of the conservative CDU party to defect CDU's Angela Merkel's party now, Friedrich Merz's party. Or they may go into coalition with this kind of fringe leftist party called the BSW, which shares some of the AFD's views on immigration, Russia, and the war in Ukraine, despite having communist origins. It's the classic horseshoe. If the AFD forms a coalition, it'll be the first time a right-wing party held power in Germany since World War II, and we all remember how well that went. A little context before people get too freaked out about all this. We are talking about a regional election. Saxony on-holt is a small eastern state of about 2 million people. It has been an economic and population decline for a while since German reunification. It's more conservative and kind of AFD curious than the rest of the country as a whole. Also, even if the AFD does take power, these regional governments have limited authority. They'd be able to control education, school curriculum, policing, some elements of migration policy, which is bad, but it's not like sort of being the chancellor, the chancellor being AFD. However, it's still a really big deal and quite bad. The AFD, for those who don't know, it's an extreme right-wing political party. They talk openly about the re-migration of immigrants. They want to segregate disabled kids and refugees into separate classrooms. They want to downplay Germany's Nazi past. They have close ties with Putin's Russia and want to end support for Ukraine. Saxony on-holt is a regional intelligence service. There's a lot of fear now that Russia could use AFD politicians with access to that intelligence to penetrate the German spy services and figure out who might be spying for Germany. The list of concerns goes on and on and on. The AFD has been steadily gaining in the polls nationally. They did well in this election for a couple of reasons, a bunch of reasons. Germany, German voters, are fed up with this sort of establishment, centrist parties that's not a unfamiliar story to anyone who's been watching elections over the last decade. They're also pissed about the economy. They're very mad about immigration and support for Ukraine in the sort of Saxony and Holt region. There is a feeling that the state has been left behind compared to Western Germany. There are major regional industries, like the chemical industry that I've really struggled recently. The AFD did especially well with male voters, voters aged 35 to 59, and they turned out an estimated 170,000 previous non-voters. Turnout was 78%, which is massive. So I've been notable here that the AFD has improved across the board and that Germans have seemingly gone from treating a vote for the AFD as kind of a solely a protest vote against the establishment to now wanting them to actually govern. The CDU, Merch's Party, Chancellor Merch's Party, got routed. He said he was shocked, which is, you shouldn't have been, everyone saw this coming. And the election would have consequences. We don't know what those will be, but he said he will not resign. But the next test for the AFD will be in the Necklenburg-Frohpommin regional elections on September 20th. So we could see another story like this pretty soon. Ben, thoughts on these elections and kind of the rise of the AFD generally so far. Well, it's not great. You never like to see the far-right ascending in Germany. And I think there are a couple of reasons that I'd underscore about why to be concerned. Number one, the AFD is really a far-right party. I think sometimes people have grown accustomed to, say, Georgie Moloney, which she got elected, you know, to be Prime Minister of Italy. She's been pretty far-right, but not like an extreme figure, in any sense, beyond some of her kind of hard-line immigration policies. The AFD is to the right of Moloney, the AFD is to the right of Marine Le Pen, you know, the AFD. It's got more radicals. They have moderated. Yeah. Exactly. They've not moderated. If you look underneath the hood, like these guys, they're not trying to kind of smooth off the rough edges. They're still hanging out, you know, with the Holocaust deniers and the kind of neo-Nazi elements. And that's why they were designated as an extremist organization by German intelligence services. So, let's be clear, like this is not just kind of like a right-wing party. party that we call far right, this is a far right party. The other problem, so that's bad, that doesn't mean that everybody who voted for them is a far right person. And that leads to the second point, the firewall that keeps them out of government, right? They can't be in coalitions with other governments in the German system, is helping them. Because what keeps happening is all the parties get together, they keep the AFD out, and then those parties get blamed for the fact that prices are high, and the government doesn't seem responsive. Frankly, those coalitions are not ideologically coherent. Like, you know, Mertz is governing with the social Democrats in the same way that Olaf Schultz had to govern with the Christian Democrats to center right. And so you're kind of stuck in this doom spiral where the AFD may be kept out of governance, but then that kind of gives them this outsider status, this anti-establishment status, and everybody else is the establishment, you know? And so that's that combination of their extremism and this kind of strange situation where the firewall, which I think is, you know, necessary or makes good sense and it puts a Germany with their history, is kind of collaborating to normalize extremism. Now I do think that the message to politicians has to be like pretty fundamental change in how you're governing and how you're communicating. You know, you can't just govern by saying the AFD is really bad. Like, we've been through this in the United States, the Democrats tried to, you know, Trump is really bad, then like look what we got. And I think it's time to really question, you know, how can you demonstrate to voters sure maybe you're not going to win over the most extreme anti-immigrant people? But how can you demonstrate that like, you know, Mertz has really prioritized foreign policy? He's really prioritized kind of like defense spending and countering Russia, which is, again, that's good. But like, maybe it's time to kind of put that a bit like on the back burner and actually focus on some of these bread and butter issues. Ben saying, "Journey first." Ben saying, "Journey first." I mean, a little bit, I mean, honestly, like, not in the AFD version of Germany first. That's the scary version. But I do think that we've seen center-left, I mean, Shane, let's plug out of a piece in the New York Times today about the, might be for the Democratic Party in this regard. We had this trend of center-left parties, or in Germany's case with Mertz center-right parties, sometimes kind of becoming these defenders of the establishment and the defenders of the norms, and you got to shake yourself out of that and figure out a way to speak to populism, you know? And if you don't, I just worry that you're going to be in a situation where like each election the AFD is making these incremental gains, and at some point, like maybe not at the national level, but certainly at the state level, they're going to start winning majority. To your point, I mean, there's a few things. First, there's like a communications problem, which is the AFD is starting to run much more kind of a young dynamic kind of internet literate candidates that are doing well, and able to sort of sand off the scary edges of the AFD and present a more exciting version of politics that is enticing people, obviously. Mertz is your classic German politician, he's kind of like, he's a big head at security summits, but he's kind of old. He looks like a technocrat. Yeah. To your point about an economic stuff, it does seem like he is doing things designed to further piss off working class people. Like, they're pushing, they're talking about raising the retirement age, they're talking about raising the minimum age at which you can retire, they're talking about some sort of tax and health insurance reforms. And meanwhile, like Mertz, as you said, is rearming the country and really committed to Ukraine, and people don't like that, and they're sick of the way the Russian invasion has harmed their economy, and then Trump goes and invades, you know, sorts of bombing Iran and that piles on top of the account. Yeah, we're not hopeless. Yeah. So we're making it worse. The flip side of that, though, in Texan, the on-halt, 7.9% of the regional population is immigrants. That is compared to 14.9% nationally. So it's a way lower percentage of the population is actually a migrant, but immigration is still the top concern. And so it's like tempting to be one of the parties that comes in, like, you know, Bernie, and it's like, well, this is clearly just the working class is getting screwed and to talk about big social services that you're going to provide them, et cetera. But that is not what voters were mad about when you asked them why they voted for the AFD. They're talking about security and immigration and hating the establishment. There were other leftist parties that were offering them a much bigger social safety net or welfare state, and they rejected that in favor of the AFD. So it's like, I think there will be people that try to approach this from like, you know, the classic lens of like, you know, you got to fight populism with populism, but there is this reality that there's just a lot of people in Germany that are rip shit pissed about immigration. A lot of it goes back to Angela Merkel's decision to allow in lots of Syrian immigrants and what year was that 2015, I think. And you know, we don't either relitigate that, but it's just like clearly that has a very long tail that is helped the AFD go from this kind of like just Euro skeptic party to something a lot scarier and a lot more xenophobic that is really helping get ideas like remigration, which is like, you know, expelling people from the country, basically, a lot of different ways to the fore. Yeah. Look, I mean, clearly, Germany, like other countries, like the United States, there's a feeling that you want to make sure that the borders are secure. It's a little more complicated than you, obviously. I do think, though, that as in the United States, I hear you and like, maybe the answer is not necessarily economic populism, but it is like the manner in which you do politics. Because I think what happens is the immigration concerns get married to this concern that there's just this clubby establishment that is completely out of touch and is just kind of just not focused on what I care about, you know? Yeah. And if there have to be ways, and some of it is communications, but some of it is policy, and some of it is like how you show up, some of it is how you acknowledge like what you did wrong. You know, like sometimes you can deal with some of the past mistakes by by speaking more candidly about them. I will say on this Ukraine thing, this is the problem, you know, Trump berating them to spend 5% on defense, and now they're rearming, and like I'm all for like NATO countries spending a little more on defense and obviously for them providing some budgetary and other support to Ukraine. I think maybe like not, maybe that's moving too fast, you know, like people, you're going to undermine NATO, you're going to undermine Ukraine if people are so pissed that it seems like that's all you're doing. It seems like all you're focused on is that. Because then that kind of ties into this sense, it's just like the United States, like you don't care about us, you care about these immigrants and you care about Ukraine and you care about NATO and you're doing five-year defense plans and I'm just not happy with the circumstance, right? So, there's, you know, I don't claim to have the exact formula, but man, if you look at both shults and murs, they did not seem like the kind of politicians that were like in touch with like what is on the minds of like a working class percent and like Saxony, you know. And so you have to get at least part of the way there to just take some of that support. The only other thing I want to throw into this mix, Tommy, is that, you know, shit, I mean, we've alluded many times to the kind of weaponization of debates about anti-Semitism about anything anybody says about Israel, JD dance, like flew to Europe, this is a thing that happened, it flew to Munich, the place where Hitler had the beer hall putch and gave a speech to Germans saying they had to accept the AFD and then met with the AFD and then Elon Musk endorsed the AFD. Like, if you want to talk about anti-Semitism, let's talk about the fact that like the administration of the United States has been supportive of like far right German political movements, you know. Like that should be a bigger topic of discussion than, you know, what the latest thing online is that somebody didn't like that somebody said, you know. Yeah, agree. And also like the AFD is a totally incoherent organization if you look into it. Like Alice Vidal, one of their national leaders is a lesbian and a party that is virally anti-LGBT. She is married to a Sri Lankan woman. They have adopted kids. Again, they're like super opposed to migration. And they're very opposed to gay couples adopting kids. She also seems to spend most of her time in Switzerland. This is the person that's beating the entire establishment in Germany. Like, how are you losing so badly to these people? And that's the part of the point. Some of this is you just got to do politics better. I mean, because in some ways they don't treat the AFD like a genuine political party, which means that they're kind of not like maybe you have to just kind of start going after these people, not just by saying they're far right and they're crazy, but by some things you just said, like these people are hypocrites. These people are disorganized. These people could never govern, you know, they can capture grievance, not like I actually saw your problem. So there's a lot of work to be done here. Elizabeth also has really close ties with China. I think she spent a bunch of time there. I think she speaks Mandarin. She only talks positively about China. It's just sort of like another kind of weird element to her background. Again, so this is red flags. Weird, terrible election outcome. We got another one coming up that we're watching on September 20th. The next national election wouldn't be until 2029. The federal election. but you know, the murder. political standing is not great right now, so pretty unnerving to see this kind of, you know, lack of stability in Germany of all places. Yeah, this drift rightward at a time when Trump is pushing them to rearm while also undercutting NATO as you said. Maybe they'll be rearmed just in time for the AFD to win the election. Yeah, perfect. Wonderful. That's what we want. Pate, the world is brought to you by Monarch. 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Don't forget, there's no safe like simply safe. Okay, also over the weekend, Trump's to fail Peace on Boys Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, and then Steve Wicoff, his old golf buddy, hit the road. They went to Russia and then also to Ukraine. So in Moscow, the two idiots met with Vladimir Putin. Wicoff said later, Ben, that he has made about eight visits to Moscow to meet with Putin and his team, and that Jared has made three. I'm wondering what the about-qualifier kind of confused me there. I wonder if there's a ninth one we don't know about, and I'd visit. But as we've discussed in the past, you know, a lot of those Wicoff meetings were one-on-one with Putin. Often there was like no notetaker, no state department, Russia experts were allowed in. Sometimes he relied on the Russian translator to translate for him too. One time Putin gave Wicoff like a painting, which he said he found really moving and emotional. So like the whole thing is just a weird mess. This was their first visit Wicoff and Kushner to Ukraine, which is strange. Here's a couple clips of the Wicoff Kushner Zelensky press conference from Keith. Hello, hello everybody. I just want to disagree with one thing that President Zelensky said, I didn't like the train. I loved the train President Zelensky. I had a wonderful time on it. It reminded me of my days taking the train to see my grandmother down to Florida. And it was great. Me and Jared had a great time. You know, President Trump comes from the business world, which in the business world, you think about things in the context of win-win. How do you create opportunities for both sides to do what's in their interest? War is negative. Everyone loses from war. Whereas business and peace is positive. And hopefully you can find big benefits from that in a big way. It's just shockingly stupid commentary all around. Wicoff said he was, quote, "very encouraged by the meetings." Jared said he, quote, "learned a lot from the trip." Glad to hear it. What Jared should have learned is that things are getting worse and worse and worse for Ukraine. They are critically low on interceptor missiles, as we discussed many times, which means the city is getting pounded by Russian ICBMs, not ICBMs, Russian ballistic missiles. Russia has been just hammering their energy infrastructure, going into the winter, which means that once again there's a big chance that a bunch of Ukrainians will just have to live in the freezing cold for months on end. Attacks in the Black Sea could lead to global grain shortages. That's something people are very worried about. And then NATO countries are increasingly sounding the alarm about Russian sabotage attacks in Europe, including this recent drone attack in Germany at an airport that was a near miss. The only benefit for Ukraine out of all this then was that Putin ordered 72-hour pause and air strikes on Kiev while Wicoff and Kushner were there. However, the rest of the country got hammered by drones and missiles throughout. So I don't know, Ben, like any thoughts, these guys are so stupid that they're easy to make fun of, but any thoughts on the value of this trip and continuing to, I don't know, keep these channels open? I guess I'm pro diplomacy in general. I don't know what's come of it. It's hard to do, couple. It's a word on Jared and Wicoff, because there was a comment that Wicoff made before the meeting with Putin. It was in like a pool spray, I think, where he's like, oh, you know, he told Putin that he was just talking to the guys outside and saying this, on all these great memories, he's getting this job. We were tired of telling these amazing stories and you'll be there. So, yeah, we've got this Florida real estate developer guy, who knows nothing about diplomacy, who's living fantasy camp, like all these Trump people are living, you get to, I'm so glad he had a nice train ride and my name was going to grandma and, you know, the Ukrainians gave him a good meal and he's flattered to be in the same room as Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, Jared sounds like a guy who's like taping an audition tape for like a McKinsey job, like an internship or something, like this is how we do business, like these guys are just like so completely out of their depth. You know, they're talking to Vladimir Putin, who's been like on the world stage for over a quarter century, right? Like you really think those guys can be able to like move Putin on issues and then they're going to Ukraine, a country that is rapidly running out of interceptors in part because these guys like help start a dumb war in Iran. So, so it's just something so like the nauseating about seeing them there. But yes, the problem is we really desperately do need some aggressive diplomatic effort to try to bring this war to an end or at least to get it to some kind of ceasefire because otherwise you're going to have a situation where the Russians are going to escalate in the winter, they're going to bombard Kiev, they're going to try to break them once again, and this time they may have more success because of the low amount of interceptors and just the wear and tear on Ukrainian society. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians will probably respond with like ever more aggressive attacks into Russia at ever more targets like pushing the envelope there, which then raises the stakes of the potential escalation in Europe. Like this thing is not moving the right direction. I think part of what needs to happen and is you need other countries like more aggressively mediating here. Like I'm not sure that the United States is up to this. Obviously the United States can't be brought in. Maybe we can find some actual diplomats at the State Department to sit in with the Europeans and the Turks and the Qataris and whoever the else fuck can get in there. But I think we need to take this, this should not be a Jared and Woodcoff like bilateral channel to the Russians bringing the Ukrainians. They need to multi-lateralize this a little bit more than is the case now. Yeah, I mean, do you see they call their train, apparently they sign on it. It's a peace express on the train, Woodcoff and Jared. They're riding on the peace train, and they're probably told us in a cat's Stevens on their iPhone. Yeah, it's totally. To your point, I mean, the Zelensky meeting was about three hours. There was another set of talks that included national security adviser from the UK, France, and Germany. That's good and necessary. But yeah, Trump's policy is basically we're cutting off Ukraine. We're not going to give them more military support. Europe has to do it. So therefore, I feel like Europe should have a much bigger role. They should be in the room. Oh yeah. In the Putin meeting was three hours. Yuri Ushikov, Putin aid said it was like constructive and useful, but also that it included a potential joint economic ventures between the US and Russia. You know that's the part that the Uwikov and Jared liked because you know, salivating that Putin's been dangling, you know, the sovereign wealth fund guy from Russia in front of their faces forever long, and you know, a possible future deals. And they know they have a couple corrupt marks there. And I don't know if you've watched the press conference. Ben Richard Engel was there from NBC News. Yeah. I said, yeah. He was like, why should people have any confidence, confidence in your capacity to succeed here? He's like, Gaza's a wasteland. The Iran war's still going. The Russia Ukraine war is getting more intense. And Jared's like, oh, go, go, go, go. And he said something about how like Gaza was built by NGOs and terrorists and has been a dystopian place for a long time, which is a nice way to talk about a couple million people, most of whom, which is also not true. It's a means we're started. Yeah. But I don't know. Like it was, it was pretty demoralizing the whole thing because I like, there. Ukraine has certainly had some momentum. They're a kind of deep strike drone campaign has been effective at increasing the cost on Russia, but it just doesn't feel like we're any close for the end of this war. - And again, honestly, I truly believe that like if you had a normal American administration, Republican or Democrat, like this is a nept diplomacy, like there should be a way to facilitate some kind of multilateral track that is trying to bring ceasefires into play, it's trying to put the issues on the table, like they've been at this for almost two years. And they're nowhere further along than they were on day one when Trump said he's gonna solve the war, you know? So I really do think that like maybe the grain shortages like last time that brought in more multilateral framework 'cause the whole world cares about that. I just don't have any confidence in these guys, but I do believe in the diplomacy of it all. And I think you gotta get other countries in the table. And hopefully, again, like just keep Jordan work off in the Middle East, not that they're solving that problem. Like just get some other people from the US government that are normies to please do this. I'm not holding my breath. - I think it's fair to criticize the Biden team for not having more of a diplomatic track to end the war, but now we're a couple years into this failed diplomatic effort. And the only thing that Trump administration has not tried is putting more pressure on the Russians. So yeah, I'd like to see them internationalize this and try that. What's here in Serbia, Ben, where there has recently been a disturbing celebration of the country's bloody history and genocide will pass. So last month, Reco-Maladic, a war criminal known as the butcher of Bosnia, died in prison at the Hague. We're even serving out a prison sentence for genocide. One might think that that would be kind of a solemn, if not embarrassing moment for the country of Serbia, but instead it's been the opposite. Maladic's body was returned to Serbia last week. He has basically been treated like a national hero, ever since, or like a head of state. His coffin was flown on a government jet. He was carried off the plane by soldiers. Thousands of people came out to honor him. His casket featured parts of his uniform and metals that he wore when he was conducting the genocide itself. The Guardian reported that the head of the Serbian Orthodox church said, quote, "We know that his name will remain deeply etched in the memory and prayers of the majority of our Serbian Orthodox people who feel and nurture a deep sense of gratitude towards him." And then on Sunday night at a soccer match in Belgrade, the Red Star, Belgrade, fans held up a photo of Maladic. They observed a moment of silence and they were chanting his name during the match. Let's watch a clip of that. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] They're pretty disturbing stuff. So let's talk about why this is shocking, but not surprising. It's shocking because Maladic was one of the key architects of the ethnic lending policy during the Bosnia War that killed over 100,000 people. He was found guilty of genocide for the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 in which 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered. It's considered the worst massacre since World War II in Europe. And he was behind the siege of Sarajevo and all these other horrific war crimes. But it is not surprising because, you know, look, the current Serbian president, Alexander Vucic, is a far-right nationalist who is himself made genocidal comments in the past, like, quote, "For every Serb killed, we will kill 100 Muslims." So obviously, he thinks this kind of ultra-nationalist fervor is good politics for him and his party. So, Ben, let's just pause there. The combination of the AFD winning the German elections, Russia escalating the war in Ukraine, these images from Serbia, they're pretty scary if you're worried about nationalism and far-right politics in Europe. Yeah, it makes you worry about Europe. And there are a number of things going on. Like, you know, one is that Vucic, the leader of Serbia, is one of these far-right guys, is an ultra-nationalist. And you look at that picture, it's like North Korea, like, you know, uniformity in the stadium. I mean, nothing like having a war criminal, like, for a moment of silence for watching the soccer game. You imagine it's like, okay, you get the ear. Okay, your son will be holding up his scarf. Like, what are we doing here? It's the psychoship. And this is a thing, is like, first of all, this wasn't a close call with this guy. Like, this is the guy literally carrying out the massacres. That everybody, nobody denies this happened. They're mass graves. Like, we know those things happened, right? Sure, like, there's clearly resentment inside of Serbia. They feel somewhat single-doubt. But that's why you need like, responsible political leadership to kind of keep a lid on this stuff, instead of pouring gasoline on the fires, including, by the way, even like the religious leaders, right? The head of the Serbian-Orderac Church, that's gonna have consequences. Like, Serbia wants to be on the pathway to the European Union. Like, that's not happening anytime soon. Like, the EU's not gonna let in, and you saw these statements from EU leaders. Like, that is not exactly suggesting you're moving the direction of integration with Europe. Yeah, look at the review part of that. So, the EU statement said, quote, "Any glorification of war criminals, genocide denial and revisionism contradict the most fundamental European values and have no place in the EU or in EU candidate countries." And then the EU Enlargement Commissioner canceled her visit to Belgrade this week. So, yeah, this should, I mean, this will likely be a serious roadblock to Serbia getting into the EU anytime soon. Yeah, and look, it is entirely tied to a lot of things happening in the world. Like, it's tied to the rise of the far right around the world and in Europe. It's tied to the rise of nationalism. But also, let's just talk about the fact that, again, he died in the Hague. He was convicted of war crimes. The United States is currently sanctioning the ICC at the Hague for trying to prosecute people for war crimes. Israel has acted with complete impunity in its conduct of war crimes and Gaza. But I'm repudent, he's acted with complete impunity with his conduct of war crimes in Ukraine. Like, it was kind of something, you know, Tommy felt like a throwback, hearing about everybody talking about international law and genocide and war crimes and the Hague as if they were things that everybody agreed on because they don't. And if you want to know why it's dangerous to sanction the ICC and to look the other way when Israel commits war crimes with American weapons, it's because you're cracking open the door to things like this because the people in Serbia are probably thinking, well, this is all a double standard. This is all bullshit. They only singled us out. The only way that you really make a norm fortified against war crimes is by applying it to everybody. And the moment you start to say, well, it's only for some people. Well, then you open the door to this kind of behavior because I'm sure what's on the minds of some of those people is, wait a second, like how come us, because we're a small country, Serbia, we get single that, our leaders end up dying in the Hague, but not Netanyahu, not Putin, right? And so again, it speaks to the need to strengthen international justice and international law across the board. And this should be a project for, hopefully, not going to be a next democratic president. Yeah, look, Vucic has been in power for, I think, nine years now. He started as an ultranationalist. He's on more of sort of in the populist vein these days, but that DNA is still there. His, like, he can't run again for a third term, but he's trying to run for, he was nominated to be Prime Minister. The next election was supposed to be in December of 2027. He used this moment to call for a snap election. And this comes after years of like massive protests against corruption. So, like authoritarian leaders like Vucic are seeing ultra-nationalists, genocidal political moments like this, as their way of suppressing the will of the people and clinging to power. It is really bleak, scary, scary stuff. Yeah, this is a big story. I mean, 'cause again, it shows you when we talk to Larry Wright about 20 years since 9/11, like on a 30 whatever years, since the 90s in Bosnia, it shows you how far we've kind of fallen in a way, right? Because in the way that the system worked, this was the case of the system working. There was a humanitarian intervention. There was a diplomatically brokered agreement to end that war. Then there was international justice against people cared at war crimes. And now here we are in the world of 2026, and we're celebrating the war criminal, right? And that is a bit of a snapshot of how the international system is unraveled. Yeah. 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With thousands of therapists and millions of members in over 100 countries, it's progress. Look, it's a crazy world out there. There's a lot going on. The international politics is scary, domestic politics is terrible. Everyone's dealing with their own stuff in their own life, whether it's family, friends, relationships, stuff at work. You will benefit from talking with somebody. You will benefit from seeing a therapist. Give it a shot. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/CrookedWorld. That's BetterHELP.com/CrookedWorld. Two updates that come from Israel. The first actually is out of the UK in Andy Burnham's new government, where the new Foreign Secretary Ed Milliband announced a major shift in the government's policy towards the occupied West Bank in a speech Tuesday. Let's listen to some of that. The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists. All too often, the Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this, and worse, members of it have made statements and taken actions to support the forced displacement of Palestinians. Now, Madam Deputy Speaker, I recognise the gravity of saying this, but the truth is, it is the least the people who face such such such suffering deserve, and it should be the prelude to justice. Now, for a long time, the British government has rightly said settlements are illegal, but we have remained silent on the question of the legality of the occupation as a whole, which in 2024 the International Court of Justice concluded was unlawful. Today, I announce that the official view of the British government is that the occupation is unlawful. The government believes the unlawfulness of the occupation should be reflected in the economic relationships we choose to have with the occupied territories. So, what this means in practice is basically, there's a quote, "Import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories," action against specific companies and individuals who provide services such as construction, infrastructure financing, or real estate for settlement expansion. I'm reading quotes from him. They also said they'll refuse all licensed applications for arms and other exports that materially contribute to the occupation, ban the advertising in the UK of illegal settlements. There's going to be some sanctions on extremist settlers, some sanctions on Hezbollah's finance arm, and then Milliband reaffirmed that he opposes BDS and supports trade with Israel. This is just about products coming out of the occupied territories. The whole speech was quite interesting. I think it's worth watching. It was framed as an attempt to, quote, "Salvage the two-state solution," and then the UK quickly had some folks following their lead here. So, the France and Canada said they'd be joining the import ban about a dozen countries released a letter explaining their intent to, you know, sort of past laws to follow suit. In practice, like this, the ban of these goods from the occupied territories will be very small economically. I think we're talking about like tens of millions of dollars out of over six billion dollars worth of trade in 2025. But it's a big deal symbolically, which you can tell from Israel's reaction, which was quite strong. They are closing the UK's consulate in East Jerusalem. They're banning a bunch of British politicians from entering Israel. They are booting the UK from the International Gaza Support Center. And then the crazy wing of the Israeli government, the crazier wing of the Israeli government, the finance minister of Baselow Smotrich, who Milliband mentioned in the speech itself, called for the expulsion of Britain's ambassador in the National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gavir, said, quote, "It's time for the state of Israel to publicly recognize that the Malvina's islands are Argentine territory under occupation, which the British violently steal from the Argentine people." So he's trying to bring up the Falklands, which is interesting timing here, given that Argentina just announced a criminal case against an Israeli company that's leading the oil drilling project in the Falklands. Then there's a blockbuster story about Netanyahu in October 7th that we'll get into. But then let's just focus on this UK policy announcement piece. What did you make of Milliband's speech and sort of the totality of what they actually announced? I actually think this is a seismic moment. I think this is a huge deal. And not just because of what it means about Israel and Palestine. And because look, this is not going to bring about a two-state solution. But what it does, the United Kingdom, let's be very clear, as usually the close to the United States, has been a pretty stalwart supporter of Israel over the years for them to break. And Milliband used language that there's ethnic cleansing, that there's terrorism mapping in the West Bank. It shows that there's really nobody left backing Israel and its government than the United States, and then kind of like a weird eclectic group of kind of Trumpy people. So that matters. The West Bank is coolly going to be the main event in the coming years. And this is essentially Europe moving collectively, including the major powers, Britain and France and others, to say this is ethnic cleansing, this is against the law, this is illegal. And once you start down that road, you usually continue down that road. And so I think we could expect to see sanctions it further in the future. So that matters. It just deepens this kind of, you know, isolation that Nenia has created for Israel. But here's why I think it's a bigger deal. Because they're breaking with the United States. Like the United Kingdom does not usually say, you know, this is really important to you and we don't give a shit. And not only they're breaking with the United States, they're breaking with the United States and bringing other allies with them in Europe to also break with the United States and do this. And that tells me a couple things. One, good for you Ed Milobin, good for you, any Burnham. We've been hard on labor party. Like this, they are not doing the kind of cautious tiptoe around things, approach the Cure Starmer did, where they were trying to kind of flatter Trump and, you know, not really weigh in on Gaza and things like this. This is damn saying, like declaring independence, right? And so this is a big move for the labor party under any Burnham. He, you know, he's been pretty, you know, he's been a good communicator. But this is him taking a pretty big, bold step, right? And Ed Milobin, Clay, got in there. By the way, the Jewish son of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, right? So that, that, that matters. And for those like who, look, you're probably not listening to the show anymore if you're kind of bothered by this policy announcement from the UK, but it's worth listening to the full speech. If anything about this rubs you the wrong way, because like you said, Ben, he talks about, you know, Milobin is Jewish, he talked about his deep connection in history with the Jewish state, you know, like spending time on a kaboots. He calls out Hamas. They talk about sanctions on Iran. He calls out anti-Semitism in the UK and the need to do more to combat it, which is not like, it wasn't just throat clearing, you know, it felt like pretty authentic to him. And then he goes into this, as you said, very intense conversation about settlers. He talked about settler terrorism. He said, "Settler terrorism is rampant." As you said, he said, ethnic cleansing, like it was a tough speech. Yeah. Yeah. So that matters with the Brits. And then also, again, this watch in the next couple of years, the Europeans are starting to, they're looking at Mark Carney, you know, they're looking at Trump's political standing and they're starting to go in the other direction, right? And so for them to break on mass, not just the Brits. And it seems like the Brits have some leadership here too, which is something we hadn't seen out of them in a while in that fashion. It's just a sign that the rest of the world is not going to take orders from Trump in the same way that they did the first year. Yeah. And that matters. And it's happening not long for a big election in Israel, which gets us to the second story. So there was an explosive investigative report out this week from Haaretz, the details, this stark warning about a potential Hamas attack that was given directly to Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu shortly before the October 7th massacre. The gist of the story, and it's a long story, and we recommend reading all of it, is that about a week and a half before October 7th, the president of the UAE Hamid bin Zayat or NBC warned Netanyahu of a potential major Hamas attack on Israel. But Netanyahu just inexplicably did not relay the message to his top security staff. And the warning, it was not derived from like kind of vague intelligence. It stemmed from comments made directly by Yaya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, the mastermind of October 7th, to a guy referred to in the story as coal eyes, who served as this intermediary between the Israelis and Hamas. And sort of this is from the report about some of the specifics of what Sinwar said. Quote, "Tell the Israelis that if they don't make progress, I'm preparing a huge surprise for them, Sinwar declared emphatically. Here, he dropped a keyword for the first time, one that should have triggered red flags. Tell them to expect a Zalzal, an earthquake." In a second meeting, Sinwar says convey a message to them, the Israelis, that I'm preparing the mother of all surprises is a terrifying operation, something extraordinary. Again, he said the word that meets earthquake. Please convey to the Israelis what I am saying word for word. He demanded it. So it's a complicated story of like, this getting back to the Israeli security chiefs via staffers who are working for NBC and folks should go read it. But basically, Ben, I've lost count of the number of stories that we've read like this about missed warnings by Netanyahu or the sort of Israeli security establishment that could have helped them prevent October 7th. And if you look back, a lot of top defense and military and intelligence officials have resigned. They have taken responsibility for October 7th. Netanyahu is the only one who is not. He says, he's always says like, oh, now is not the time. First, we win the war, then we look back, blah, blah, blah. But this story implicates him directly. In the timing of dropping this a month before the election was not subtle, I think the question is, will it have the impact you'd think it would politically? We don't know yet. This is always bothering me. We've talked about this. There's just something that never felt right about why their guard was so down again. Not having the information to tip into the conspiracy theory that Netanyahu let it happen intentionally. It is the case that it never made any sense that Gaza is one of the most surveilled places in the entire world. And the idea that they were kind of caught that flat footed and didn't respond for hours while was happening, like it really does demand serious inquiry. The Netanyahu is not permitted to happen. He is not permitted. He's used the fact of an ongoing war to elude having any kind of commission, any kind of inquiry here. But there's huge fucking questions about, maybe he didn't think it would be that big of an attack, but maybe he thought some attack would be convenient. And if you think that's cynical, we're talking about BB fucking Netanyahu, like the most cynical person on earth. Because now we've heard the Egyptians warned him, we've heard the security chiefs warned him, we've heard of reports from inside of Israeli intelligence. It was quite specific about some of the preparations - They have the plan to attack a year out. - Yeah, the actual plan, like these are not subtle pieces of warning. This is not like coming up in the 9/11 anniversary, that one PDB article, "Presidential Daily Briefing to Bush" been lot and determined to strike in the United States. It didn't really have any specificity. This is like a lot of blinking lights and people telling Netanyahu, hey, they're about to attack you and hindering nothing, right? And that at minimum, that was massive incompetence, like anything else is much more troubling. The only other thing that I thought was interesting to me, the report is about NBC doing this, Muhammad bin Zayed, the United Arab Emirates, who's been their best friend, like the closest ally, close friend of the region. This seemed like it came out, if not from the Emirates, like the Emirates must have had to confirm it, you know? And it made me wonder whether the Emirates are sick of BB. I mean, I don't know I'm just speculating here, but it's people who've dealt in the kind of weird machinations of leaks that happened before elections, not saying we've done that. I'm just saying like that happens out in the world. It suggests to me that maybe the Emirates were okay with this coming out, like right before the election to harm BB. I don't know, we don't know the answer to that either, like it's worth thinking about because they've tended to have his back and maybe they're just sick of them too. I don't know if it's gonna have any impact on him, though, because he's the guy's managed to wiggle out of anybody who's inclined to believe these things about BB probably wasn't voting from the beginning with, but we'll see. Yeah, the whole story is worth reading. It's quite confusing. I mean, Netanyahu gets criticized from every direction in this thing because this guy coalized his intermediary, was part of an effort to try to sort of improve relations between the Israeli government and Hamas, maybe get to a prisoner release, maybe take some steps on the Israeli side that make life better for the people in Gaza. And what it sounds like, what the reporting suggests is that Netanyahu dragged his feet on cutting a deal with Hamas, a deal with Sinmar, and Sinmar got pissed and issued this warning to maybe, I don't know, threaten Netanyahu, but also you have sort of national security, or try to go Netanyahu into acting. And then you also have national security side staff, like Ronan Barr, the Shinbet and others, telling Netanyahu that they're worried about something happening by Hamas, Hamas doing something, and that they wanted, it says, Barr recommended an operational method of a fire extinguishing bomb. They codename for a powerful and sudden attack designed to quickly neutralize a major threat, or at least implementing strong defensive efforts in Gaza and the West Bank. So on the one hand, you have Netanyahu getting criticized for not getting a deal done with Hamas that could have improved relations. On the other hand, you have the national security staff saying that Netanyahu was being too soft on Hamas and not letting them do like decapitation strikes or something to kind of, I don't know, try to deter or prevent some sort of attack. So all around, it's just the worst possible story for Netanyahu, but like you've been, I have no idea if it will matter at all in this election. - Yeah, no, we'll see, we'll see. - A couple of Ronan updates. So the kind of tit-for-tat airstrikes continue, Ron launched missiles at two US Navy ships on Friday. They didn't hit them, but the US retaliated by bombing three Iranian oil tankers. The sent-com commander said, "Let the message to the IRGC be clear. "If you shoot at two of our ships, "we'll impose an even higher economic cost, "taking out three of yours." Trump repeated his threat to maybe bomb pickaxe mountain last week Friday, which I'm sure, you know, got a few, he would all excited. Ron said they're gonna announce a new restricted zone in punish ships that enter it. There's not a lot of details on that one, but there seems like they're kind of proceeding to pace on their effort to just take control of the street or her moves. Trump administration announced some new sanctions, that specifically on Iranian airplanes. Again, I don't think that-- - That'll really, yeah, that'll win the war. - Yeah, they'll have a D-Day right there. - Over the Pentagon, the New York Times reported that 50 people on the military's joint staff were subjected to polygraph tests. This is because of leaks about depleted US munitions, which like, in fairness is a pretty sensitive leak. The kind of thing you might expect to be investigated, but also at the same time then, like, think tanks have been tracking this issue way before that war even started. They just use kind of open source data to monitor as best they can the stockpile. So those are out there regardless of who mayor may not have been talking at the Pentagon, but notable. Over the weekend, the US Energy Secretary Chris Wright seemed to suggest that they've given up on getting a nuclear deal with Iran. He told ABC, there may not be a nuclear agreement, it may simply be simply destroying their capabilities to do it, the problem may await a next administration. So it sounds like that big success, you know. - Now we obliterate them, me too. - And then most concerning to me, Ben, the fighting between the Saudis and the Houthi rebels in Yemen keeps escalating. At least 73 people were injured in Houthi strikes on Saudi oil infrastructure sites over the last couple days. The Houthis say it was in response to previous Saudi strikes, but of course, the Saudis are not preparing to retaliate. This could kick up the civil war in Yemen that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths literally. So very, very disconcerting. But anything in that kind of Iran news jump out of you is particularly important? - The tip for tat such as, it just feels very forever warish, which we've been saying. The polygraph thing is actually pretty fucking nuts. I've never heard of kind of mass polygraph of joint staff members. These are like senior members. There's a McCarthyism to this that makes me wonder like, when is the military just going to say, have you no decency, Pete except, you know? So that kind of weird, the paranoia and intimidation is just getting weird and weirder, and it's only moving in one direction. And I'm curious whether that brings about the opposite result that they want, they're trying to bring them in line. It might have the opposite effect, we'll see. I do agree with you that the Saudi Houthi thing is the biggest news of all this. Because if that becomes like anywhere near like a hot war, it is going to just like further destabilize things. The Saudis, you know, are yes, like frustrated. But at the same time, at the Houthi start hitting Saudi oil fields, at the Houthi start trying to mess with traffic and the Red Sea. All these shortages that we've been talking about that are acute because countries have kind of spent down their reserve capacity to make up for loss supply. Certain refineries have been taken offline. If you just start to see Saudi oil infrastructure get hit, if you start to see disruptions in the Red Sea, prices are just going to get worse for everybody. The global economic impact is getting at worse. So that is, that's something to watch because there's nothing good about they were escalating between the Saudis and the Houthis, including obviously for the people of Yemen. Yeah, and what I just wonder is whether the Iranians are watching our political calendar closely and decide to do something to try to kind of jack up. They will. I bet you they will. That's a very smart point. We'll see. And finally, Ben, so corruption allegations have once again engulfed right wing reform UK leader in British MP Nigel Farage. For those unfamiliar with Farage, imagine if kind of an early shitty version of Grock AI wrote a book about Winston Churchill, then you soaked it in stale beer, and then it morphed into a creepy old man with strong views about immigrants. That's Nigel Farage. The latest scandal comes via this kind of non-profit investigated journalism organization called verbatim that was then fact-checked and aired by Channel 4. In the report, you got two high-up officials in reform. There's a policy guy named James Orren and Farage's right-hand man named Dan Jukes. They are caught on camera conspiring to break British law on political donations from foreigners, like debtor rights. The reform staffers, they solicited money from a guy they believed was the British-based son of an American businessman. And first, they get the American to pay 30,000 pounds for three polls for reform. Two of which, Channel 4 notes, the quote, "helpfully galvanize support for the party ahead of the local elections in May." And those results will run in the Daily Telecom. graph and other newspapers without noting reforms involvement in any way. They also talk about getting a much larger donation, maybe 500,000 pounds, and a range of meeting with the fake father and son with Farage himself. So here is some audio which, in video, which makes it quite clear that everyone knew that they're doing something pretty shady. Let's watch. - I would breathe a lot of this to anybody. Obviously, I'm not sure what they're going to do. They're worried that he doesn't want you to run a lot though. - What you're doing right now means that you can contribute in A. It's an amazing sweet spot. Even though it's a big job that this is money. - Yeah. - A huge impact and they don't show up anywhere in America. - You're having a part with who's effectively going to be the cheapest app in a minute, right? - Yeah, exactly. - Exactly. - Is that his interest, I don't know what it is. - Oh, exactly. - Exactly. - Obviously, the support that we've often so far had to be necessarily private to sweet. But we, the mechanism now for this next phase is we've had some discussion for Dan and James. - And he's all about the Lord. - So, no, we'll be here. - Hello. Thank you. - So this comes, obviously, as Faraj is mirrored in a whole bunch of scandals. We've talked about the five million pound gift that he can't seem to explain that he got from this Thailand-based crypto billionaire, this new investigation and this Blockbuster report may undercut the brilliant Faraj plan of dropping out of Congress or talking about a parliament, rather, and then running against an intergalactic trash can named "Binface" to try and clear his good name, not sure that one worked, as he hoped. Faraj sat down with the BBC to defend himself. If his goal was to remind people that he does not feel shame and will lie about anything, it was a great success. - Let's watch a clip from that. - Look, my job wasn't so congruent. My job wasn't so background checks. My job was to turn up on a lunch, have a glass of wine and shake someone's hand. - Did you not know that it was illegal for foreign firms to donate to UK political parties? - Of course I know that. - But were you just not been paying attention to you asking the question? - No, because I was told he was giving it to a UK family trust, oh, sorry, a family office that was based on the UK. - He said, "In your presence." - No, I am not. - I am not. - I am not a compliance officer. I was in the middle of the canvassing and the claxom by election. I turn up. I frankly wasn't even listening. - You were listening. - I just asked, is it all about board? I was just there to come and say hello. - So you weren't listening when you were discussing donations of thousands and thousands of people? - I was told, I was told that there was a global family office based in London. - This is defensive literally. La la la la la, I wasn't listening. - Yeah. - Not quite the buck stops here. So the two A's or in juke's, they have stepped down pending investigation. Farage obviously has not. I don't know, man, how is this not the end of this guy? I mean, it's not just this scandal. It's that Farage in reform are facing a threat from even more right-wing anti-immigrant party, restore UK, but the corruption is just so brazen. - Everything about the story I love. First of all, great work. And more of this. - Right, this stuff is awesome. This is great, then trepid, kind of quasi journalism, quasi, Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes movie happening here. I mean, for people who couldn't watch this too, it's the most British thing. Every is wearing natty clothes. They're drinking gin and tonics. People are smoking sigs in the footage. They're in red armor chairs. It just oozes this kind of preppiness. Everything you hate about reform, actually. Just kind of rich guys sitting around, making crept deals, getting drunk in the middle of the day. Not there's anything wrong with that. But the core point is, the guy's just hopelessly corrupt. I mean, like, scandal after scandal of him just taking money from anybody. It goes back to what we're saying about BB2. Like, his best defense is that he was completely incompetent. - Right. - His best defense is that - That he wasn't being attention. - I show up at meetings. I don't pay any attention. I didn't listen to what I agreed with the person about, which was I was like saying like, "Thank you for your foreign donations," or, you know, like, this, they just need to keep driving this corruption narrative to, by the way, because, you know, just to be pure political grass tax here, like, reform UK's being hopelessly corrupt is probably better than saying reform UK's extreme. You know, it's just imagined pure politics. Because, like, nobody likes corrupt people. Nobody likes people that are double-deal like this and then lying about it. So, it's a thing that they should run on. I do think that, you know, Nigel could, like, make up a lot of his money if he just, you know, did more of those cameos, right? - Yeah. - I mean, I guess his fees went down. So, he needed to go to the tie crypto guy and the sky end of the American billionaire, whatever he was supposed to be. - The only way I feel like this doesn't take this guy down, or at least down a couple serious pegs, is if the rest of the British media doesn't run it. I mean, that's one challenge with Farage, is he is often gotten to pass. He doesn't get nearly the coverage that, you know, the green party head gets, despite, you know, being talked about. - They would savage, yeah. Like, come on, Fleet Street, you know, like, can you imagine, they savage people for like tiny things over there. - Right, like, like, like, let's, let's do it. - For you to get some things, yeah. This is a, this is a no-brainer. Okay, we are gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, you're gonna hear Ben's interview with Lawrence Wright about the 25th anniversary of 9/11, where the risks still exist from an attack like that, and much, much more. So, stick around for that one. (upbeat music) - This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to elevate your online presence and drive your success. Squarespace gives you all the tools to claim your domain, build a professional website, expand your brand, and facilitate payments all in one place. With Squarespace's collection of cutting-edge design tools, anyone could build a bespoke online presence that perfectly fits their business. Start with Blueprint AI, Squarespace's AI-enhanced website builder, to get a fully custom website in just a few hours, using basic information about your industry, your goals and personality to generate premium quality content and personalized design recommendations. Every dream needs a domain. Squarespace domains makes it easy to find the best name for your business at one fair, all-inclusive price. No hidden fees or add-ons required. Squarespace provides everything you need to bring more of your dream to life, whether that means building a website or adding a professional email service, don't wait to claim your name, invest in your dream domain today. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/world to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at squarespace.com/world. - I'm Nate Silver. - I'm Galen Druke. - And I'm Claire Malone. - We're back. This time with our friends at Crooked Media for a new show called Still Counting. - Yeah, numbers are hard, it takes very easy. - And frankly, numbers have only gotten harder. - What does the data actually say? How do we reconcile that with the other things that we're seeing in American politics and around the world? And how do we use that data to understand or maybe even dare to predict the future of American politics? - New episodes every Wednesday, starting September 9th. Subscribe to Still Counting on youtube.com/@StillCountingPodcast or wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music) - Okay, my guest today is Lawrence Wright. His Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Looming Tower, Al Qaeda in the Road to 9/11. Really is, I think the definitive account of the lead up to the 9/11 attacks, wonderful, colorful, heart-wrenching, revealing a story. One of many books from Lawrence Wright, of course. The Looming Tower has a new introduction time to the 25th anniversary of the attacks, which are obviously coming up the next few days. So it's the perfect time to catch up with him. And I, again, encourage everybody. If you have not read The Looming Tower, please pick it up. There's no better book to understand what happened before 9/11. And I say that to someone who worked with the 9/11 commission. But Lawrence Wright, thanks for joining us. - It's a pleasure, big way to be in. - All right, so I was thinking about this a lot. You know, you and I've talked about these events over the years. 9/11 obviously played a pretty fundamental role in my life. And I read the new introduction a couple of times. And it triggered something that has not at me as someone who worked in obviously national security has had interaction with 9/11 even before that time the White House with the 9/11 commission. And the question is this, you know, even though Ben Laden didn't achieve his kind of stated objectives, right, of overthrowing Arab regimes and driving the United States out of the region, you could mount an argument, couldn't you, that 9/11 is one of the most successful terrorist attacks in history viewed from the vantage point of where the United States stands today in our overreaction. I mean, how do you assess the impact of 9/11, both against Ben Laden's intentions and against the outcome that we're living with today? - You know, there was a question in my mind, Ben, did Ben Laden win. Of course, he didn't win. I mean, but he triggered this catastrophic, nearly suicidal reaction in our country. And, you know, just think about the lives that have been lost, you know, 3,000 on 9/11, but hundreds of thousands since then. Yes, there has not been another 9/11, but there have been countless smaller attacks. It's not as if the terrorist movement is dead, [BLANK_AUDIO] The loss of faith in America is the thing that is really striking to me. Country is so divided, we've shed the most important allies that we've had. We're really quite alone in the world in a way that we haven't been in a lifetime of anybody still alive in America. The country is drifting and now being shunned. And the other thing that troubles me is that we're so complacent now where terrorism is concerned. As we were before 9/11, could it be that we have gone so far around the circle that we're back where we were, unprepared? Our attention is far away from terrorism and yet I look especially at the new developments in technology and wonder what Ben Laden would have done with such tools as artificial intelligence and crypto money and easy access to cyber warfare. Those kinds of tools are incredibly empowering to terrorists and to tyrants. And I can't help but feel for all the great things that technology may bring to us. We're going to head to a golden age of terrorism, tyranny and crime because these tools are going to be very well adapted for those. Yeah, your book obviously traced the story both of Al Qaeda's emergence and its intentions and ambitions and ultimately its success in attacking the United States and also the failures of the United States government to effectively defend the country, the failures of information sharing from the CIA to the FBI. We don't have to detail them here. What I wanted to ask you picking up on that last point you made is now we're seeing this administration kind of target the intelligence community, the FBI's run by Caspatel, their agents are doing immigration enforcement instead of counterterrorism. The DNI was Tulsi Gabbard and now we've had musical chairs there. The CIA's Trump seems to have an almost adversarial relationship with. How would you describe informed by your experience of seeing a series of policy and bureaucratic failures before 9/11 in the looming tower, how would you compare the things that concern you about the state of play today when you look at those same agencies, those same instruments of US government power and intelligence gathering and law enforcement as it relates to the different terrorist threat we're facing. You know it was, I firmly believe until this day had the central intelligence agency cooperated with the FBI that 9/11 wouldn't have happened. The agency knew that the two future hijackers were in America and they came in January of 2000 and the CIA found about it in March of 2000. So a year and a half they had knowledge that Al Qaeda was present in America and yet did not tell the FBI. So there's that. There's also the fractures between these two institutions, the FBI and the CIA. Not only were they reluctant to share information, they hated each other, they actually hated each other to the point of subversion and that it's hard to account for. For instance, you know, you look back at the bombing of the coal in October of 2000. This was partly a poor planning on the part of the government to park an American warship in Aiden, Yemen, Harbor, you know, where it's just sitting there as a big prize. But anyway, it had, was it 17 sailors die and the CIA had information about the, they had actually surveilled a meeting in Malaysia and of Al Qaeda leaders and from there, several of them went to Yemen and with the plan to bomb the coal. And so that knowledge was also present and hidden. Bear in mind, we already had dead sailors. You know, this was a mass murder, you know, and in my opinion, back starting from then, there should have been prosecutions, you know, the intelligence agencies had to be forced somehow to work together and it's a pattern that I see in our agencies now that, you know, they are so fractious right at this present time. Not so much that they hate each other, the way that CIA and the FBI did before 9/11, but there's, they've been corralled into partisan ventures and they've turned their eyes away from terror and really in many respects, away from the main adversaries toward American citizens. And so how can we be prepared for foreign threats if we're preoccupied with trying to control our own population? Yeah, and, and, you know, particularly parts of the population that really are not the area where you would see terrorism emerging from generally. I mean, I want to kind of connect this back to where we weren't wrong because I think it's kind of related to how you focus things and get them right now because on the story of the failure to prevent 9/11 was not one of the United States failing to kind of invade foreign countries and remove their governments and it was as you said, it was like potentially as simple as the CIA sharing information with the FBI better, you know, or, you know, having better aviation security, you know, regulations as related to, you know, box cutters and we could go down the list. And yet the response was to invade Afghanistan, toppled its government and stay there, invade Iraq, toppled its government and stay there. Because I think some people might hear, you know, you and me talking about the need to focus on terrorism and think, oh, here they go again, you know. How do we separate out, you know, the need to actually protect the nation to guard against terrorist attacks and not like, when did it become and why did it become about your willingness to go fight wars overseas? Like, you know, I remember John Kerry had this almost gath people thought of the time when he said during the 2004 campaign, we need to get back this being a law enforcement problem. I guess you could have said intelligence and law enforcement, but yeah, but how do you think about where we went wrong after 9/11 and what the right scope of the government's focus on this is where we're not spending trillions of dollars in fighting wars, but we are defending the country. Well, there are several different areas we can talk about. One though that strikes me is that the invasion of Iraq was perhaps the most colossal diplomatic and intelligence failure in American history. It's just hard to imagine, you know, America has always had a problem dealing with other countries because we know so little about the world and the world knows so much about us. It's, you know, it's a total, I mean, we're essentially blinded when we go into a country where we don't speak the language. Again, do you remember back when we first were going into Iraq and I forgot the reporter's name. He went through the capital, talking to legislators and asked them, "Can you tell me the difference between Asunee and a Shiite?" Yeah. No way. No way could. This is the most fundamental division in Islam. And they didn't even know how to answer the question. And yet we're willing to go fight a war in a country that was so far away from our way of understanding. And so, you know, we should know more about the world. There's no question about it. There's a big issue, but we should know more about ourselves. We should know that we're not good at this. How many wars is it going to take for us to realize that winning wars is not one of the things that we do well, but damaging our own country is something that we have so much power to do. And America has been badly damaged since 9/11, but not by terrorists. Yeah. Yeah. Well, part of that too is understanding, you know, the rest of the world and also understanding honestly, like who we're fighting against, you know, because, like, clearly Trump does not understand the Iranian government at all. And that, you know, if you did understand the Iranian government, you would know they were not going to collapse, because we bombed them for a few days, right? And I always kind of bugged me that, you know, Bin Laden's having a moment and you alluded to this in the introduction, you know, his Vatua has emerged on TikTok and young people are saying, yeah, maybe he had a point. But I do think that, I mean, as someone who was reporting on this at the time and wrote this kind of meticulous account. how understanding, and you traveled to these places, understood, Al-Qaeda. I remember I was assigned by my boss, Lee Hamilton, the coach of the 9/11 commission, go read all of Ben Laden's fought was, you know? 'Cause Hamilton actually wanted to understand, like, what is this about? And whatever we think of Ben Laden, including his absolutely reprehensible, violent individual, his actions are unjustified, he was saying for a long time that what he objected to was our foreign policy, you know? And putting yourself back in that time and George Bush was saying, they hate our freedoms, you know, they hate what they see in Congress, and they, like, what we learned from the need to actually separate out that you can try to understand your enemy and put yourself in your enemy shoes without justifying or celebrating them as people may be doing in TikTok. Like, why do we struggle so hard? And how much of what we got wrong about the response and all of them was about just, not even trying to understand why it happened? - I think there's an arrogance there that suggests that we don't need to know all these, the answers to your questions. We have the power to do whatever we want. And it's true, we have a tremendous amount of power. And in a way, it reminds me the old cartoon character, Baby Huey, do you remember? Baby Huey was this 400 pound baby, you carried a club, and that's the way the world views us. And in many respects, given how powerful and clumsy we are in the world, it's a fair comparison. But I just wanna say about intelligence. Understanding the world is what intelligence is supposed to be doing. You know, it's supposed to be gathering information and providing that to policymakers. But in my, when I was roaming around the Arab world in South Asia after 9/11, there were so few Americans or even Westerners in that area then. And I remember in Afghanistan, I was given a briefing by a supposed, by some CIA guy, but he said to me, I'd like to do what you do. I said, what do you mean? I talked to people, he said. And I said, there they are. Go out the door. You can talk to them. I think that, you know, on the ground kind of intimacy with another culture is one of the main things that we like. We just didn't, and this true of journalism too, Ben. You know, there used to be, you know, news bureaus all over the world. You know, like ABC at one point had like 40 around the world. Now it's, yeah, they're handful of news bureaus in the world, American news bureaus. And how, and so what happens? You know, we, I, or somebody like me parachutes in with no history of a region, or was also true, is we accept the news that the governments of these other countries are putting out. Like, whatever is on Saudi television, we don't have anybody there, so we'll broadcast their view of it. That's not journalism. You know, that's essentially we're, we're allowing other points of view to dominate our thinking. And we don't have, we need to have independent intelligence gathering both by reporters and by our own intelligence agencies. Yeah, I always, one of my, you know, when I look at the biggest failures of, you know, my time in government, I look at like a Afghanistan. And when I think back, because I've gotten to know a lot of Afghans over the years, and what every single one of them tells me is any one of us, if you just talk to a smart, normal Afghan, they could have told you, you were backing all the wrong people, you know, you were making all the mistakes. And then I thought about it, and in all those rooms, I was in the situation where people were making decisions about Afghanistan. There never any Afghans there. It's like if we just talk to these people, maybe we would have avoided that. I mean, I do wonder, you know, a big part of your story takes place in Afghanistan. It feels like there's an effort to kind of just forget that that happened, you know, we're four years after the collapse of Kabul, the Taliban is back in control. I'm wondering how you feel about that. I don't know if you still have contacts there. How do you put in context of all these different pieces of the 9/11 story, like how do you digest the experience in Afghanistan, and what do Americans, you know, maybe continue to owe Afghans at a time when, you know, down Trump is having ice-deport people that worked with our military, and we're kind of not really doing anything to help a humanitarian crisis there. - You know, our longest war, you know, can you, would you have ever predicted that we would have been tied down in a 20 year war in Afghanistan? It's just, and the Taliban was not our enemy, you know, they harbored Al Qaeda, yes, but they were not, you know, our enemy, they were not waging war against America. So, from the very beginning, we had no business invading Afghanistan. I remember when I was there, it was a kind of hopeful period. It was a brief interlude, you know, that they seemed like, you know, they were, the Taliban had been put to bay, and, you know, this, it looked, I remember the sound of hammers and saws, you know, as they were beginning to rebuild, and I was very hopeful that that would happen. If there's anything we should get from this, is that we have not got a solution that works, our diplomacy doesn't work, our warmaking doesn't work, so what works? And if you don't have an answer to those questions, don't wage war, you know, you're, it's a catastrophe. And I think it's been so much on my mind recently, the preciousness of all the lives that were lost. You know, tragedy becomes kind of blurred when it becomes so vast, you know, hundreds of thousands of people dead. That's a great loss to humanity. And, and then, of course, the individual lost to families and lovers and so on, is just, it's hard to imagine, the heartbreak that we spread across the world. Not that other countries have responsibilities, of course, on this, but I, but I look at the, you know, we could easy to think about the $8 trillion that we lost in Afghanistan and Iraq, but all the Americans, the Afghans, the Iraqis, who have perished in, in this experience, it's just a catastrophe that I don't think we've really taken in, in part because I don't think we want to absorb the responsibility that we have. Yeah, well, and, I mean, one way, you know, is to also think about the alternative history. Like, what if we didn't do those things? Like what do you spend $8 trillion on? Right? I would America be different today if we didn't make those mistakes. It's, I think it's a profound question. It's not one that is being asked these days. And all the things that, you know, even the democratic socialists, you know, their entire agenda could be, could be enacted. And there's still be plenty of money for rice and beans, you know? It's just, it's, it's, it's just not, it's, it's a heartbreaking thought to think that we could have spent that money on educating our children and, and, and scientific advances, curing cancer, whatever we could have been so much better. But we spent all that money so fruitlessly and with such devastating consequences. You alluded in your introduction, you know, as someone who knows, as much about, you know, the history of the 9/11 attacks as, as anybody certainly was, not, wasn't in government, and probably more than more than people in government, you alluded to the fact that we still don't know the full story, right? There's some unanswered questions that people continue to raise about Saudi involvement, most notably. Frankly, we still can't seem to prosecute people for 9/11 because we tortured them and their, their confessions are inadmissible in court. What do you think the, as someone, you know, who's, you know, probably finished or broke with some questions in your mind? What do you think the unanswered questions are? Well, I think there must have been some kind of conspiracy between the Saudi government and the operatives of 9/11. And to me, the, the most damning recent evidence is that cardboard box that was in the FBI warehouse and it had come from the investigation of, it went on by the FBI in England. There were a lot of jihadis living there and they've stored all this stuff in a cardboard box and somebody in the bureau was going through to see, you know, cleaning out old stuff that's no longer needed. And there was this box and it full of investigative notes from 9/11. And so he called one of the FBI guys who was still around and said, would you like this box? Oh, sure, send it over. And inside there is a lot of the material from Omar Abba Yumi who was a 40-something year-old Saudi student who didn't go to class and he was-- was on the Saudi payroll. He is a, he's the guy who met with the hijackers after they arrived in January of 2000 and and sending them. Well, they arrived and he met them in a in a halal restaurant in Los Angeles. And he said he overheard the golf Arabic being spoken, you know, and just cycled up to them and said, um, let me help you. I'll get you a place in, in San Diego, in an apartment in my building. I'll pay your rent and, uh, and then some of the, you know, there are these videos and one is, um, of him introducing these two hijackers to members of the Islamic community in San Diego. Now, on the 9/11 Commission, you might have seen an edited version of that video. But the full version is much more damning. And it's always struck me that, with the cases never really been made, but they were introduced to the Imam of the mosque in San Diego who was, uh, Anwar Al-Alauki, who became the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and, uh, in Yemen. And, um, and eventually we killed him. But these kinds of scraps are on the table. And, you know, by Yumi, he was also had, he, there's one video that looks like he's a newscaster standing in front of the Capitol and, you know, pointing out, you know, and here's the airport over here and so on and you, uh, he's actually giving a standup, uh, report about the, it's, it appears, uh, a prospective target. And, and there's, uh, whether it's more to it, but the FBI took the box, looked into it, said, oh my, and put it away for years. Yeah. Yeah. And that, uh, you know, this, when we start thinking, if we'll ever hold anybody accountable for the errors that, um, took place both in the FBI and the CIA, you know, there's, there's more to the crime than, than we have, than we have solved. And they're, you know, you hit point, rightly point out that Guantanamo is a problem in terms of getting to the bottom of some of this, but there's so much, there's so much that we could know and it would require, would require holding not just foreign terrorists responsible with members of our own intelligence community. Yeah. And it drew your transparency that, I mean, I noticed, so when I'm down here releasing all these files today that show that New York City was covering up their air quality. I mean, transparency is something that people usually encounter with. Yeah. I, uh, last thing I was going to ask you is, uh, because I think this is on a lot of people's minds, certainly on mine right now. Um, how did, how did 9/11 change your life? Oh my god. I said, there's, there's Larry before 9/11 and Larry after, you know, it was, um, I, I guess one thing, years ago, I made a vow that I would only do things that were important or fun. I didn't want to have, you know, lose the joy, but, um, at the time, I was sort of drifting and, uh, I was thinking about becoming a movie director or something I had, you know, vague, uh, dreams of Hollywood and, um, and then suddenly I had a mission and it wasn't just a reporting job, you know, uh, it was from the very first day I was on the case and I just knew that this is the most important thing I'll do with my life. And, um, you know, that afternoon, uh, David Remnik called us with, it was a small group of our New Yorker writers that he delegated to go out and try to collect stories and he would put it into what became the famous black issue. And, um, I, I had a good fortune of finding this young reporter named Kurt Jelsen, who was a wrote for an investment magazine. And he was supposed to have an appointment that day on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center. And he, for the first time his life, slept through his subway stop. And so he got off the next station, ran back to the Trade Center. And, um, if you remember the, the elevators were up a flight of escalator. And so he rushed up the escalator, got into the elevator and, um, a woman was coming across the lobby and she was moving too slowly for him. And she stepped into the elevator and he noticed that on her ankles, she had a rose tattoo. And then the plane struck. And the elevator doors accordion. And nobody knew, I mean, it was a earthquake, you know, it was just, nobody could fathom what had happened. And Kurt stepped into the lobby and there were objects around the size of a shoebox or office desk, you know, various, you know, probably bits of plaster that had fallen out of the ceiling. And his eerie smoking environment, he saw trees and went to get outside. And of course, it was up a flight of stairs and it was a plaza. And so he walked out into the plaza and there were hundreds of shoes. And there were objects that he thought were luggage, but there were human torsos. And his, his journey to try to get back home to Bronx became the book end of the New Yorker Black issue. And I count that as the moment that I became the, whatever I am now, you know, that's when I made that decision that that I was all in on this and I had to get to the bottom of it. Yeah. Well, we appreciate all the work you've done. It's helped us understand. In a stranger way, led to some of your other work, which is interrogated power and what's happening in America and what's happening in the Middle East. Everything is kind of in some way a branch off the tree of that decision you made. So people should check out the living tower if they haven't already checked out your other work. And we could have talked, I mean, there's so many things to talk about this, but we covered a lot. So thanks so much for joining us. I enjoyed it quite a lot, Ben. It's good to catch up with you. Yeah. Good to see you always. All right. Take care. Thanks again to Lawrence Wright for joining the show and talk to you next week. Potsy the world is a cooking media production. Our show is produced by Alona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Nina Shabonturgy. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hearthcoat, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffitt, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Her staff is proudly unionized with the writer's guild of America East. I'm Nate Silver. I'm Galen Druke. And I'm Claire Malone. We're back this time with our friends at Crooked Media for a new show called Still Counting. Yeah. Numbers are hard. It takes very easy. And frankly, numbers have only gotten harder. What does the data actually say? New episodes every Wednesday starting September 9th. Subscribe to Still Counting on youtube.com/atstillcountingpodcast or wherever you get your podcasts.